If you actually work for a living, though, this is terrible advice.
Why you should quit your technology job and get a Ph.D. in the humanities
41–50 of 53 posts
Re: Why you should quit your technology job and get a Ph.D. in the humanities
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the term "rite of passage" may have prompted the response. A rite of passage is generally something that every member of a culture (or subculture) goes through to get from X to Y.
That's why I wrote the second paragraph. It's still a logical fallacy to assume that "rite of passage" means "this is the only way to proceed" . It's just an event that marks an important stage in someone's life. There are lots of different rites of passage in every culture/subculture, and most people ignore most of them. If you're atheist, is it "insulting" that Jewish kids have Bar/Bat Mitzvahs?
No.
If a someone told me I am not an adult because I had not had a bar mitzvah, I might be insulted.
Re: Why you should quit your technology job and get a Ph.D. in the humanities
#43The sentiment is unimpeachable- but the advice isn't. Get the education, and the perspective that come with it- absolutely. But it doesn't require a retreat to academia for several years to gain it anymore. The internet is the collective knowledge and experience of all humanity. To seek this information is wise and wonderful- but I respectfully suggest that dropping ones life to go back to school, chained anew in deb…
I don't see the internet as a source of wisdom, or even knowledge, depending on what one means by the word. Information, certainly. But the mental habits that the internet as a mass medium fosters are antithetical to study and reflection. I love the internet, not least because of the ease with which I can obtain information that used to take hours in the library. But obtaining specific facts is not the same thing as…
I am going to follow your advice, disconnect, and try to really understand some books.
Re: Why you should quit your technology job and get a Ph.D. in the humanities
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yea, after studding AI I find most philosophical debate boring. There may be interesting areas in philosophy outside arguing about unspecified definitions but I have not found any. Consider the Chinese room argument, where is the brain? It's the arrangement of all the players and their rule sets. What is consciousness, it's their internal state etc.
So, if you have the philosophical Q's figured out, could you send me the lisp code for the 'redness of red', I need my latest program to have phenomenal feeling.
For example, few ever use the tactic of "dissolving the question". In this case, Mary's Room has had a basic treatment of that over at Less Wrong.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/5n9/seeing_red_dissolving_marys_room...
Re: Why you should quit your technology job and get a Ph.D. in the humanities
#45As one who's gotten a Master's in Classics, I can say that my timeline for reference is about 3000 years, and more if I think about Egyptian papryri, and Indo-European Poetics. Most technical people have a timeline of only about 50 to 75 years, maximum, and it's quite a beneficial change of perspective.
Re: Why you should quit your technology job and get a Ph.D. in the humanities
#46Re: Why you should quit your technology job and get a Ph.D. in the humanities
#47I think you would be well received if you were to offer full scholarship and stipend equal to the participants salary.
Re: Why you should quit your technology job and get a Ph.D. in the humanities
#48A. The PhD concept, like academia itself, is broken. For most people, it's 5-7 years to get narrow training for an industry that has sold out a generation and a half and probably won't exist, in any meaningful way, in 40 years on account of how badly it has treated young entrants. The last time a disaster as bad as the academic job market occurred in the U.S., two countries got invaded.
B. You'd think the philosophy degree would give him the ability to avoid inverted-causality fallacies, e.g. "I know how to think a certain way because I got a philosophy Ph.D."
Don't get me wrong. I think there can be a lot of value in a Ph.D. program. But I think for a successful person in technology, it's a really bad idea from a career perspective. I'll focus on this:
Because the thought leaders in our industry are not the ones who plodded dully, step by step, up the career ladder. The leaders are the ones who took chances and developed unique perspectives.
Does he really think that everyone who takes 5-7 years off to pursue a humanities Ph.D. gets some kind of magical career rocket fuel that propels him or her into a decision-making role where broad-based perspective is crucial? I doubt it.
Now, I will agree that society would benefit immensely if our leaders (including in technology) actually understood the humanities, and many don't. On the other hand, that doesn't mean that taking 5-7 years off to study philosophy increases your chance of becoming one of those leaders; I think it lowers it, sadly.
Re: Why you should quit your technology job and get a Ph.D. in the humanities
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Purple air sounds like rage." Is grammatically correct and passes a wide range of linguistic filters, yet for some reason it has zero meaning. Still read it a few times, it feels like there should be some meaning there. This get's at a core problem with language. Language is based around the assumption that something meaningful is trying to be communicated so we rarely bother with much precision. You can refer to id…
The problem of qualia[1] is about the relation between knowledge of a phenomenon and experiences of that phenomenon. 'Emotion' has nothing to do with it, unless you consider the mental state that is the result of 'the perception of something blue' to be a distinct emotional state, in which case your usage of the word 'emotion' deviates from the common way[2] it is used. I'm sorry if this seems unsubstantiated and uns…
Suppose you walk into a room who's walls are covered in fresh blood. Now Suppose instead you walked into an identical room that was identical room except the blood was green. What separates those two rooms is at some level a simple color filter, but your internal responses are going to be vary different. If you could slow down time and look at the individual responses to each room you could watch as the red or green information propagated around your individual neurons.
But at what part of that does 'redness' apply? The individual rods and cones independently respond to photons but you have to go into post processing before the concept of red is separate from white or black. If you look at the way neurons work there is some computation involved and comparison between individual sensor neurons but at some point that neuron fires and guess what that's what redness means. It's the internal state of on ore more neurons looking at those signals. Now you can ask about memory but it terns out that's a recording of internal states which is not really a copy of some RGB value but a copy of some of your internal state while the event was gong on. And when it comes to language you are communicating internal physical states. You can describe your dopamine levels in flowery language but there are underlying physical processes which your are describing.
Having said all that you could talk about the platonic ideal form for redness, but just because what he said sounds like it has meaning does not mean it does. He did not understand what was going on so he built up complex ideas that don't apply in the abstract instead he is describing your internal classification of things. When I look at this picture my internal chair classifier goes off etc.
PS: I am of course greatly simplifying my description of how the brain works but from a philosophical perspective the details are not vary important.
Re: Why you should quit your technology job and get a Ph.D. in the humanities
#50If the point is to become a well rounded person, think widely and read widely, then getting a PhD isn't going to help you much. I think of PhD's as very driven, focused, able to take a lot of abuse, able to write and research for several years. I don't think of them as particularly well rounded.
In particular, getting a PhD in Philosophy from Stanford after a BS in CS from Columbia and an MS from MIT is going to give you a couple of survey courses in Philosophy, and then a very deep knowledge of a very, very narrow band of philosophy..
I learned how the quantifiable, individualistic, ahistorical—that is, computational—view I had of cognition failed to account for whole expanses of cognitive experience (including, say, most of Shakespeare). I learned how pragmatist and contextualist perspectives better reflect the diversity and flexibility of our linguistic practices than do formal language models.
QED.
If the point is to be well read, well rounded, and be able to think broadly about a variety of topics, then... read a book. Read a lot of books. Read broadly. Read widely. Read people that you disagree with. Argue with writers.
Read literature, comparative religions, philosophy, cultural anthropology, sociology, history, science fiction, mythology, fantasy, psychology, biography, poetry.
Read Carl Jung, Freud, Neitsche, Marx, Kant, Dickenson, Poe, Emerson, Hawthorne, Plato, Aristotle, the Bhagvad Gita, the Koran, the Tao, The Tao of Poo, Luther, Martin Luther King, Tolstoy and Doestoyevsky, Adams, St. John of the Cross, the Mystics--Christian, Bhuddist, Kabbalist, and Sufi, Gleick, Feynman, Shakespeare, Chaucer.
Chances are, if they say it's a "classic" it's probably hung around for a long time because it's good. (Except for Kant. He couldn't write worth crap). And, in reading we learn that we are not alone. We learn that perhaps creating a True AI isn't something to be desired anyway. We learn that maybe consciousness is more than a deterministic bunch of bio-chemical reactions taking place in our frontal lobes that can be modeled via neural networks and computer processors. And, we start to wonder, if perhaps as the poets proclaim... there something called a Soul. And if there is a Soul, can we actually create that via silicon, light, magnetics and electricity?
You can get that education in $1.50 in late charges at the library. You don't have to spend 3 years and $150k at Stanford working on your Phd.